Does anything about this seem kind of... eerie to anyone? Maybe it's just because it's really late and when I first saw the comic I expected it to be animated and was half-expecting a screamer or something, but the mysteriousness of it all is just giving me kind of a creepy vibe.

We're actually up to no fewer than 4 distinct images now. Female-stick-figure has turned her head back, but it's a different image than the first two. Very strange...Edit: The complete set so far, AFAIK.

I'm not sure what the URLs actually are... They look too long for most common hashing algorithms. I suspect they're just random noise, to deter bring able to find future images. Which means that reverse-engineering that first image will be impossible too, unless they loop eventually.

Great. Well first post, and my post is getting flagged as spam, so instead of a message detailing what's going on i'll have to narrate.

The image url is actually a url that redirects to another location. So right now it goes Time.png => another xkcd url => an actual image file on xkcd's CDN.

So Randal can programmatically change where the url redirects to, and that's how the image changes over time. I've been playing around with the command line on my mac and watching when things change, but i can't discern the pattern.

Imagine how long this could feasibly go on for. As someone on explainxkcd pointed out, 5 years from now, there very well could be a tree growing there. They're simple enough to draw. He could just do them whole batches at a time. Who knows?

I may be another person reading too far into it, but the title and text seem to have a double meaning. There is the literal instructions that tell you the nature of the comic and the metaphor. Since the two people in the pictures have transitioned from sitting next to each other to holding hands it may be about, "waiting for the right time." Although, considering the struggles Randal has been through it may also be about simply having time together.All conjecture on my part, though.

Ignoring how exactly he's doing this, one thing I've noticed between the images is that the drawing style is slightly different each time, while the position has been relatively the same save for the third picture. Perhaps this is a recollection of how he's become better at drawing and developed his style as time has gone on? The third picture could be a representation of the time when he used that style there perhaps were hard times between the two of them. Thoughts?

EDIT: Unless the hash is salted. In which case it's (even more) impossible.

I expect it done by the end of the week

Honestly, it sometimes feels like if something that people look at for entertainment is taking too long for them, they WILL find a way to make it faster

While there is a certain beauty that comes out of a slow, drawn out tease, I too would like to see what happens when a very bored, and properly motivated group of people can do. It's this, or world hunger...

Randal could draw one of these perhaps every 5 seconds - if he spent 12 hours total doing so, this would go on for 6 months.

OTOH, the comic is simple enough that the placement of heads, arms, and legs could be algorithmically generated. In which case, there could be an huge number of computer generated images spooling out at a half-hour clip, for years. That seems more like Randal's style.

With enough "frames" captured, perhaps someone can diff them and see how similar the parts are.

No scripts, though; the .png is actually .png......I was almost hoping it was a MIME-type gif, with .png extension. Just to throw people for a loop. But no, it's all server-side, so there's nothing we can do but guess hashes.

edit: Oh, and I tried looking at it through tor, current image is the same so it doesn't seem to be user-specific but global.

assuming only upper, lower, numbers, characters it is more than 5 characters long.

So Far:69715ed9abc8deac4fa1edfd49a7fde6970b1c8621a381b1fca2c0854b29c0dd752687b61523144c61736cd89f8c153dc41e19128f72d78d44947ff800f057fa6e162ade96f5a05b3223df0bcc6fd2ca3c76447a8d6095cee7ff56b2816c959ccdcc6b46b32c53f8596cd0106958b42c4260b9cbc022e6d94054147aa6554960

Eplicas wrote:Ignoring how exactly he's doing this, one thing I've noticed between the images is that the drawing style is slightly different each time, while the position has been relatively the same save for the third picture. Perhaps this is a recollection of how he's become better at drawing and developed his style as time has gone on? The third picture could be a representation of the time when he used that style there perhaps were hard times between the two of them. Thoughts?

Imagine how long this could feasibly go on for. As someone on explainxkcd pointed out, 5 years from now, there very well could be a tree growing there. They're simple enough to draw. He could just do them whole batches at a time. Who knows?

My guess is that it's all been drawn already, and that it loops every 24 hours, or perhaps every week.